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How many data scientists are there?

In a famous Harvard Business Review article titled Data Scientist: The Sexiest Job of the 21st Century, Thomas H. Davenport and DJ Patil (now Chief Data Scientist at the White House) reported on the growing need for data scientists in a world where the amount of data was growing exponentially. The article likens the new data scientist to the “Wall Street ‘quants’ of the 1980s and 1990s”:

In those days people with backgrounds in physics and math streamed to investment banks and hedge funds, where they could devise entirely new algorithms and data strategies. Then a variety of universities developed master’s programs in financial engineering, which churned out a second generation of talent that was more accessible to mainstream firms. The pattern was repeated later in the 1990s with search engineers, whose rarefied skills soon came to be taught in computer science programs.

Today, extracting insights from big data requires a skill set that goes deeper than the job requirements of a business analyst or an engineer. It requires an understanding of data engineering, machine learning, and statistics. And the response for this demand has been the development of a new job role — the data scientist. But just how many of these people are there?

How has the number of data scientists changed over time?

Based on 236 million LinkedIn profiles, we found that there are about 11,400 and 19,400 data scientists worldwide.

This may seem like a small number, but when you take into consideration the growth in the number of these titles since 1995, it’s more impressive; at least 52% of all data scientists have earned that title, or begun identifying themselves as such within the past four years.

What does the future look like?

This trajectory, coupled with predictions about job shortages, paints an interesting picture about the future of data science. A McKinsey report entitled Big data: The next frontier for competition looks at 2018 job market projections:

The United States alone faces a shortage of 140,000 to 190,000 people with analytical expertise and 1.5 million managers and analysts with the skills to understand and make decisions based on the analysis of big data.